The 17 students who took over UVA\’s Madison Hall for four days in April are off the hook on their trespassing charges. On Monday, May 23, Judge Robert Downer in Charlottesville General District Court dismissed the charges against all the students. He said that because UVA Chief Financial Officer Leonard Sandridge had told the students that they had five minutes to vacate the building, and yet UVA police began arresting students before that five minutes was up, that the case had to be dismissed on lack of grounds. The judge also said that the University had been sending mixed messages to the students, by agreeing to have a dialogue with them, then having them arrested.

Six months ago, in our “2006 Development Forecast,” C-VILLE reported not on how Charlottesville and Albemarle have already changed, but on how our home was going to change. Hours spent adding up rows and rows of numbers from the City and County’s planning offices yielded startling totals: a potential for 18,725 new residential units and 6,235,451 more square feet of commercial space on the way in the next decade or so.

It’s always nice to have at least some idea where the money is going. Or, in the case of most UVA students, where their parents’ money is going. Lately, this has proven to be the source of some concern to a group of UVA students who don’t want to see any of their families’ money invested in companies that do business in Sudan, or with the Sudanese government.

In February, Jeremy Harvey left Charlottesville on the midnight train to Las Vegas. The shady local banker (and past C-VILLE cover boy) left his girlfriend and her children to remarry his ex-wife, 81-year-old newspaper heiress Betty Scripps. Now, however, it appears that Harvey, 62, has left Scripps after just three months. According to multiple sources familiar with his status, Harvey is back in town and living in his Colthurst mini-mansion with the girlfriend he demurred for Scripps. Scripps and Harvey were married for the first time from 1997 to 2004.

Reports of Dr. Iain Gainov’s death appear to have been greatly exaggerated.

Faced with a life-changing experience, people can change. That was the central argument of Kerry Cook's defense attorney during a three-day trial that unfolded in Charlottesville Circuit Court last week. On May 11, the jury sentenced Cook to nine months in prison for resisting arrest during a domestic dispute at Friendship Court back in August 2004. The fight ended when one of the cops shot Cook in the stomach, leaving him near death and in a coma for three weeks. Cook faced two other assault charges in the incident, but the jurors could not reach a decision on those charges. Cook, who has been in jail for 21 months on separate charges, will now serve another nine.